Life Goes to the Movies (6 page)

“The hell it was. Don’t you know by now that there’s no such thing as a coincidence except in bad movies and worse novels? What
happened this afternoon was no coincidence. What happened today is called Destiny, otherwise known as Fate, otherwise known as Fortune.”

He changes the subject then and asks me whereabouts I’m living. I’ve taken a Flatbush share with some former art students and tell him so.
“What about you?” I say. “Where do you live now?”

He points across the river at the Pepsi-Cola sign, with its giant blushing neon soda bottle. “Behind the second smaller ‘P’ in Pepsi.
That’s where we live, as in you and me, babe. Or do you plan to spend the rest of your days cooped up with a bunch of skanky ex-art
students?”

8

On the Queens side of the 59
^th
Street Bridge, above a windowless industrial building, a barge-sized neon sign winks on and off, on and off,
floating the motto of the Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company, reminding all within eyeshot that

PERFECTION IS NOT A ACCIDENT

Above the motto looms an imposing tin eagle, its silhouetted wings spread across the Manhattan skyline. From my window its talons seem to claw at the
tops of skyscrapers. This is where I lived with Dwaine Fitzgibbon for some months starting in the winter of 1977.

Our apartment building is a block away from the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant on a street named Extra Alley, as if there had been just the right number of
alleys in the vicinity and it had been thrown in for good measure. For its short length the alley parallels the tracks of the No. 7 elevated, so close
that, from the same window that frames the Eagle Electric Company sign, I can read the lips of riders as they careen by amid showers of sparks and
squeals of tortured iron.

Our apartment has three rooms, including the kitchen, where a shoe-shaped bathtub floats on a lake of cracked, spinach-colored linoleum. There’s
no bathroom, just a closet with a toilet. In summer the window sashes swell and in winter they shrivel, shedding chunks of pale putty and plaster that
look like the droppings of constipated birds. What little heat the landlady provides radiates from a silver pipe that climbs up a corner of the kitchen
and which, though hot enough at times to cause third-degree burns, fails to heat the place properly.

There are more than a few things I have to get used to in my new home. For starters it’s the noisiest place I’ve ever lived. There are the
elevated trains digging tunnels through my sleep, and garbage trucks bleeping and growling, and the caterwauls of coital cats, and stray dogs barking
endless streams of monomaniacal Morse code, and radios blaring, and wailing car and burglar alarms, and the hissing of that damned silver pipe, so loud
at times it sounds like a spaceship trying to blast off. And, rumbling away under all those other sounds, the steady drumroll of Dwaine’s
Promethean snores.

Then there are those nightmares, Dwaine’s nightmares, the ones that typically end with his blood curdling cries, screams that wake me up thinking
he’s being stabbed to death in his sleep. I rush into his room to find him sitting wide-eyed up in his bed, his face glowing red with each flash
of the Eagle Electric motto. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I say, holding him, his shoulders sticky with sweat. “You had a
nightmare, that’s all. It’s okay, it’s okay …” As his breathing returns to normal I settle him back into his bed,
wondering what sort of nightmares make him scream like that, and if the flashing neon bloodies his dreams.

9

Living with Dwaine wasn’t all darkness and nightmares. We had good times, too. Though we no longer owned a movie camera, it didn’t stop us
from making what Dwaine called Tibetan Sand Movies, with Dwaine filming away behind an imaginary camera and me acting out our carefully scripted
scenarios. And though I longed for us to get back to making real movies, for Dwaine, who’d had his fill of ten and fifteen minute shorts, that
prospect held no appeal whatsoever.

“I’m done making dippy-ass toy movies,” he said. “The next movie you and I make is going to be a feature, or forget it.”

Meanwhile we kept exploring New York—a city I came to equate more and more with Dwaine, as if he and it were one, and in ways they were. We
walked everywhere, soaking in the city’s most intimate aspects and features, honing our senses on its grindstone-gritty streets. Dwaine believed
it was every artist’s duty to sharpen his senses and keep them sharp. “You’ve got to look, look, look, and keep looking,” he said. “You’ve got to pay attention as deeply as when the eye doctor says, ‘Don’t blink’—a level
of concentration worthy of blindness.”

Just what did he mean by that, I wondered.

“The central line must be pursued. To get there you’ve got to drill through the third eye; you’ve got to shoot the sleeping Cyclops
in the brain. That’s what I mean, babe, by looking.”

We studied the patterns made by torn bill postings on the sides of garbage dumpsters and plywood construction fences, the striped shadows hurled
against a brick wall by the railing of a fire escape, the film-noir moodiness of streetlamp’s reflections in a puddle after a rain shower. We
studied people, too, the man in the raincoat dozing on the subway, the way his arm fell next to his side as he slept, the shiny little smudge of saliva
next to his mouth; the lady walking her mutt schnauzer in Gramercy Park; the guy selling chestnuts on the corner of Fifth and 49
^th
, the way
he shook the cold like a clinging cat from his legs. The cameras in our heads never stopped rolling.

But Dwaine’s lessons weren’t strictly visual, olfactory or geographical. Above all he wanted me, his tutee, to appreciate the fact that
artists hold a unique place in society, a privileged place exempt from the conventions and restrictions imposed on other mere mortals. To prove this
point, as we crossed Queens Boulevard against a murderous onslaught of traffic, he admonished me for slowing my gait to let a transit bus roar by.

“Babe,” he said, “if you’re going to walk with me please do us both a favor and do it like you own the goddamn street,
okay?”

I protested. “Did you see the look on that bus driver’s face? I swear the guy had a hard-on! He would have run me over!”

“You’d have died with dignity, at least. The point, babe, is to never, ever let them see you sweat. Dig?”

10

Still, and though I appreciated all the things Dwaine had to teach me, living with him posed certain challenges. Like those nightmares, for instance,
and his mystery walks, excursions he undertook alone almost every night after dinner, usually not returning until after midnight, if at all. When
I’d ask him where he was going he would respond either with silence or vaguely, saying he had personal matters to tend to.

And no, I could NOT go with him.

Was it pure curiosity or too many cold nights alone that made Dwaine’s disappearances unbearable to me? Where did he go? What did he do? I had to
know.

And so, out of frustration as much as anything, one night when he went out on one of his mystery walks, I decided to follow him. I waited until he was
down in the street, spying on him through my window to see which direction he turned. Then I hurried down the apartment buildings’ ill-lit and
loosely treaded stairs, reaching the street just as Dwaine’s shadow swung around the corner.

It was winter still. Dwaine walked with his hands deep in the pockets of his army surplus pea coat, his cigarette weaving a blue trail of smoke for me
to follow. Through a series of increasingly dismal neighborhoods I shadowed him, past sleeping subway sheds and low buildings squatting under a
cave-like sky. Once he turned and nearly caught me, and my heart fell like a stone in my chest. But then he kept walking, shoulders hunched, heading
for the expressway overpass, where, among a sea of concrete pillars, I lost him.

As I stood there feeling more lonely and miserable than ever, wondering where my best friend had gone, suddenly he leapt out from behind one of the
pillars, startling me so completely I fell back-first onto the icy sidewalk. Dwaine wasn’t a big man. He was my height, more or less, about
five-foot-nine, a bit on the short side if anything. Still, standing there with his face lit from below like a face in a horror movie, he loomed bigger
than life.

“Sorry about that, babe,” he said, helping me to my feet and even brushing me off a little. “I meant to scare you, but not that
much.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad it’s all right. Now supposing you tell me why you were following me?”

“I wasn’t—” I began.

“Don’t lie. You were following me. The question is why?”

I bit my lip. I was nineteen, but just then I felt much younger. “To find out where you were going?” I tried.

Dwaine’s smile lit up the dark. “A good answer,” he said. “And I appreciate your honesty. But don’t follow me again,
okay?”

To let me know there were no hard feelings, he jiggled his false front tooth at me.

Then he turned and kept walking, disappearing through the tall iron gates of Calvary Cemetery.

11

The kitchen tub was the center of life in our apartment, the Acropolis of our fourth-floor Athens. It was where we soaked and scrubbed ourselves, and
where (using a salvaged door as a tabletop) we broke bread and had most of our dinner conversations, which revolved, as always, around movies. Dwaine
did most of the talking, as garrulous when it came to movies as he was reticent when it came to just about everything else in his life, advancing his
feelings and opinions as if they were facts, with me challenging him only when the things he said struck me as patently absurd. One evening he insisted
that every time you see an orange in The Godfather it means that somebody is about to get rubbed out, that Francis Ford Coppola actually planned
it that way, that the bright fruits symbolized violent death. When I dared to suggest that it was probably a coincidence, Dwaine gave me a sideways
look as if to say of course it’s a coincidence, you ninny, I’m pulling your fucking chain, as usual. On another occasion he
theorized that in North by Northwest, when Cary Grant stands waiting at that dusty bus stop in the middle of nowhere—before the crop
duster scene—the lack of any scenery (aside from a withered corn field) or background music was meant to express the barren void at the center of
“our nation’s collective conscience.” This I doubted every bit as much as I doubted his Godfather “orange theory,” only
this time I didn’t argue with him, feeling that he was in earnest (though with Dwaine you could never tell).

After a glass of wine or two or three, we would speak to each other thus:

Me: My whole artistic life feels carved from soap.

Dwaine: Then draw a bath, babe. Get squeaky clean.

Me: I’m ashamed of my squareness.

Dwaine:
To win admission into the Academy, Giotto drew a perfect circle; you draw a perfect square. Between ruler and compass the gods of creativity
don’t discriminate.

Me: I’d like to draw one perfect circle, or even a squiggle.

Dwaine:
The perfect is the enemy of the profound. We’re all flesh and blood, babe. You’d better go to work on loving yourself. When the sand
drains in the hourglass it’s time to turn the glass over.

Me: What will it take?

Dwaine: Wine, song, and all the good will you can muster.

Me: Will you be there?

Dwaine: Brother, do you see me going anywhere?

Me:
My father never read to me. My mother never fed me her own milk. I never saw my parents hug or kiss or share the same bed. Your folks are drunks;
they drained the Seagram’s Seven; mine drained the cup of misery.

Dwaine:
Do you plan to feel sorry for yourself all night long? Because if you do, I may need aspirin and earplugs, a violin to play and a pot to puke in.

Me: Sorry.

Dwaine:
Don’t apologize, babe, and whatever you do don’t regret. Guilt and regret top the chart of useless emotions. Live with the consequences
of the future you make as you make it. Does that make sense?

Me: What’s it like, being an alcoholic?

Dwaine:
Like a calm red eye at the center of a hurricane of murderous rage; a charmed state of siege against the City of Common Sense. And yet I’d
give anything to be dry, almost.

Me: Almost?

Dwaine: Anything, that is, except booze.

Me: I get it.

Dwaine: I’m like a starfish. Dry me out and I shrivel up and die. Sober, I cease to be.

Me: I’m sober enough for both of us.

Dwaine: I believe you’re right. And it’s a great comfort to me, babe, it really is. A great comfort.

Me: We live in strange times.

Dwaine: That’s hardly true or even fair.

Me: You don’t think it’s fair?

Dwaine:
No, I don’t think it’s fair. “Strange” does too great an injustice to all other times, especially when you stop to consider
that the times we live in now suck the big whazoo. Since their inception the 1970’s have never ceased to suck, not once, not for a split
second. The decade’s sole redeeming features can be summed up in two words, “Martin Scorsese” …

Dwaine did most of the cooking, too, bringing home bleeding steaks, London broils that he would season with pepper and garlic and panfry on our stove.
To watch Dwaine cook was an intense experience, like love or war. Fork and peppershaker in hand, he presided over the frying pan like a priest with a
crosier and a thurible. There was something coded and regimented about him, like a soldier’s squared-off shoulders, until he’d burst out
laughing or jiggle his front tooth and destroy the effect.

One night, Dwaine brought home a big bag of fortune cookies he’d found in a dumpster outside a fortune cookie factory, at least a hundred of
them. We sat side by side at the tub/table, smashing them open like walnuts with our fists, reading the fortunes aloud to each other, adding the phrase
“in an insane asylum” after each fortune, giggling like schoolboys. Those fortunes that captured our imagination we taped to the
refrigerator door. The others we set on fire using Dwaine’s cigarette lighter, turning the pale slips of paper into tiny writhing angels of
colorless ash.